After much beating my head against a wall I have found out that not a lot of thought was put into the installer of DeadlineClient.
We are deploying Deadline on at least 40 workstation machines with 6 Slave nodes at the school where I work. We use Absolute Manage to push the client installer to all the computers. For obvious reasons we do not want the slave launching with the launcher on the 40 workstation computers.
Here is the problem.
The silent installer has a command to tell the launcher to not launch the slave when it starts (/autostartslave No) but this ONLY effects the account used to install the DeadlineClient. The package is installed under the local administrator account but all the users log in with their domain accounts. This setting is NOT copied over to their profiles. This is a serious problem and not an easy fix.
So I ask…
Why does ‘/autostartslave No’ only work on the account used to install the DeadlineClient? Or more importantly why is the slave starting with the launcher the default option?
Hi,
You can use the Deadline Pulse “Auto-configuration” system to ensure that any user which log’s to any computer will receive the correct settings.
I use this in production on a large farm and it perfectly keeps everything configured correctly on all my slaves no matter who log’s in.
Check it out here: http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/deadline-5-autoconfiguration
Mike
Sorry to heat the installer has caused you so much grief. The client installer was actually designed with node installations in mind, as opposed to workstation installations (since generally studios have more nodes than workstations), that’s why the autostartslave setting defaults to True. It’s also saved on a per-user level, since some studios will have their artists log off their workstations and log back in as a render account, and it was desired to have separate autostartslave settings per account so that the slave would only auto-start for the render account.
Maybe we need a setting in the system-wide deadline.ini file to specify whether per user settings are supported. If disabled, the Deadline applications would pull all of their settings from the system file only. The Deadline applications should probably also pull the default from the system deadline.ini file if the per-user one doesn’t have that setting configured yet.
As Mike mentioned, the auto-configuration feature could be helpful for now.
Cheers,